William Thomas Calman

Dr William Thomas Calman FRSE FRS FLS (29 December 1871 – 29 September 1952) was a Scottish zoologist, specialising in the Crustacea. From 1927 to 1936 he was Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum (Natural History) (now the Natural History Museum).

He was born in Dundee, the son of Thomas Calman, a music teacher, and Agnes Beatts Maclean.

He studied at the High School of Dundee.

In the scientific societies in Dundee, he met D'Arcy Thompson. He later became Thompson's lab boy, which allowed him to attend lectures at University College, Dundee for free. After his graduation with distinction in 1895, he took on a lecturership at the University, where he remained for eight years. When Thompson died, Calman, along with Douglas Young, wrote his obituary notice in the Royal Society of Edinburgh Yearbook.

He later worked at the Natural History Museum, where he became assistant curator of Crustacea and Pycnogonida and Keeper of Zoology. In 1909, he wrote the Crustacea section in Lankester's Treatise on Zoology, where he introduced the superorders Eucarida, Peracarida and Hoplocarida as well as the concept of the caridoid facies, a hypothetical ancestral malacostracan. He wrote several of the entries about crustacea for the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition. He also established the current division of the Branchiopoda into the four orders Anostraca, Notostraca, Conchostraca and Cladocera. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1921, being the first graduate of the University of Dundee to be so. Calman retired to Tayport in 1936, but returned to teaching during the Second World War at Queen's College, Dundee and St Andrews. He was president of the Quekett Microscopical Club from 1926 to 1928, president of the Linnean Society from 1934 to 1937, and was awarded the Linnean Medal in 1946.

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